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Corpus-aided extensive English reading class on the stylistic

features of political speech “what to the slave is the Fourth of

July ?”

JING YANG

Chengdu Normal University

For this competition , my materials contains the following parts :

Part I: my teaching context

Part II: my teaching rationale

Part III: teaching design*(in English)

Part IV: reflection

Part V: Reference

Part VI: appendix

Part I : 教学设计背景介绍

我任教的科目是二本院校英语专业一年级学生的《英语泛读》教

程第 2 册，本次教学设计选取的是第 5 单元的拓展阅读部分，如图：

单元主课文题目是《How Obama became the first African American

President of the Us : the untold story》

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教材 单元主课文 拓展阅读材料

在真实课堂教学中，我在第 5 单元教学中，通过在线教学平台发

布了课前学习的微课资源，重点就是围绕单元课文涉及的语篇知识，

即政治演讲的特点进行了讲解, 受疫情影响，课堂采取的是录播形

式。如下图所示：

在完成了以上单元主课文阅读基础上开展了拓展阅读练习，选取

的是一篇著名的演讲稿 What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? from

Frederick Douglass ,July 5, 1852 ，拓展阅读部分采取的是学生课前自

主阅读，完成思考题，课堂直播互动讨论的方式进行的。

本次基于语料库的英语课堂教学设计就是基于这个情景设计的，

重新改造了这次直播课程的教学方式，融入了语料库技术，采取语料

库辅助的英语泛读学习模式，针对演讲稿的文体特点展开了教学。

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Part II: my teaching rationale

1.将语料库的方法与英语泛读教学结合培养学生的阅读能力。

（1）利用 AntCone 软件检索 keyword list（提取主题词功能）辅助学

生把握篇章大意；

（2） 结合 Concordance plot（语境共现）辅助学生分析政治演讲语

篇中代词的使用特点、词语宗教特色、以及平行结构等修辞手法。

2.对话式学习、探究学习、合作学习和自主学习相结合。

（1）教师提问、追问实现对话式的交互；

（2）教师精讲示范，学生渐进自主实现探究式学习；

（3）小组合作探究问题，实现同伴交流循环和同伴示范循环；

（4）技术辅助作用，连接学生课外自主英语词汇学习和语篇分析。

3. 培养学生英语学科知识与提高语言技能并举。

（1）理解文章主旨大意与基于内容的文体特点学习相结合。

（2）培养英语专业学生的批判性思维。

（3）从理论到实践，做中学。

4. 语料库辅助英语教学的原则：

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（1）教师前测学生的阅读理解的基本情况。

（2）教师利用语料库搜索结果引导学生分析语篇的文体特点。

（3）学生使用语料库合作探究总结语言现象。

（4）学生依据语料分析结果进行语言输出表达。

（5）学生利用语料库辅助英语读写自主学习。

Part III teaching design

Teaching objectives:

From this lesson students can be able to:

1. Understand the main idea of the speech .

2. Analyze the lexical features of pronoun used in political speech.

3. Analyze the religion color, one of the textual features in political speech.

4. Analyze the parallelism, simile and repetition ,as the rhetorical features in political speech.

5. Use Corpus as a tool for discourse analysis, inductive and autonomous learning.

Duration: 90 mins

Teaching aids : AntConc

Teaching procedures:

Step 1:Teacher models the operating steps on the classroom screen(as Fig1) , directly presents

the corpus results of keyword list(as Fig 2), and interacts with students about question

1 :“What’s the main message that Frederic Douglas is trying to convey in his speech ?”

Teacher tip:

1. Since students prepare to read this speech before class, teacher needs to check students’

understanding of the main idea.

2. Teacher show students the operating steps of using word list as following:

(1 ) use a corpus containing 99 famous English speeches as reference .

(2）Press［Tool Preference］,choose［Keyword list］, for［Reference Corpus Options］point

［Choose Files］, chose the prepared reference corpus “99 famous speeches. TXT”,shown as

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Fig 1. setting up the reference corpus

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Fig 2 keyword list

Step 2: Teacher activates students to observe the keyword list (as Fig3) to think about the

question :why do these pronouns‘your’,‘they’,‘you’ appear frequently instead of the first pronouns

‘I’, ‘we’? and raise question 2 : When does the speaker address the audience as “you”,“they”, and

when does he talk about “us” and “we”? How would you explain this?

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Fig 3

(1) Teacher demonstrates how to use concordance plot to search the places “we” appear as

follows shown in Fig4:

Fig 4

(2) Teacher introduces how to use concordance to analyze “we” within its context as Fig5.

a) Teacher can guide students to analyze those adverbial phrases on the left of “we”.

b) Then, teacher instructs students to mark those verbs（verb phrases）following “we” and

Teacher tip :

Before class, teacher has shown students mini-course on the online

teaching platform to introduce the lexical features of political speech. The first

person, both singular form and plural form, is extensively and most often used than

the second person and the third person. Why in this speech , it’s the opposite.

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divide them into action verbs( indicating his purpose) and mental verbs(showing his attitudes

towards the recipients)

c) At last, mark those recipients.

Fig 5

(3) Teacher models how to explain the usage of “we” by categorizing those surrounding words

into different groups and builds the word relationship for students, as is shown in Fig 6.

Fig 6

Teacher Tips :

1.李文中（2003）points out that Keywords can be categorized into six groups:

agents(行为者),recipients（接受者），actions(行为词），locations(位置词），

descriptors(描述词），ordinatiors (等级词），associative words (联想词）.The

categorized elements are based on specific context.

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Step3: students work in groups to discover question 2

They are instructed to:

(1) use concordance plot to search the places where “you” , “they” , “us” appear .

(2) use concordance to mark those surrounding words based on their different linguistic

functions as Fig 5, categorize them and use mind map to build the word relationship as Fig 7

(3) Based on these research results, try to explain why those pronouns are used in this way.

Fig 7

Teacher Tips :

1.Teacher can engage in different groups’ discussion ,listen to them and give

necessary support for using the corpus.

2.Each group may focus on only one pronoun such as “you” , “they” or “us”.

3.After discussion, representative students in different groups can report to the

whole class about their group’s discovery and communicate what they have

achieved and what problems they encountered .

4.In the end of this stage, teacher can summarize the key points of discourse

analysis and learning strategies.

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Step 4: Teacher shows keyword list (Fig8) and guides students to observe the keyword list to

think about question 3: Why do these nouns “church, God, religion, slavery, liberty ”appear with

relatively high frequency ? Was he critical of the church? critical of Christianity ? What does he

want Christine to do ?

Fig 8

(1) Teacher shows students the concordance of “church” and “Christianity” as examples.

Fig 9

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Fig 10

(2) Students are instructed to :

1. By observing Fig 9 and Fig 10, fill in the blanks of the following activities individually.

2. According to those adjectives used as the descriptors,work in pairs to discuss the questions

“Was he critical of the church ? Was he critical of the Christianity ?“What does he want Christine

to do ?”

Step5 Students work in groups to find more evidence and details to analyze the relationship

between Christine and slavery by using words’ concordance to analyze those descriptors,

collocations with the religious words, such as “God”, “religion”, “slavery”.

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Teacher Tips :

1.Since religious color is one of the textual features in political speech ,which has

been introduced in mini-course before class, students only have a nodding

acquaintance with this knowledge.

2.However, through this exploring activities above, students can further understand

religious color and its relationship with the theme (abolishing the slavery) of this

speech.

3.In a sense, students’ cross-cultural awareness may be improved since they know

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Step6 Teacher asks question 4 “what rhetorical devices used by the speaker ?” and uses corpus to

show examples used in this speech ,such as simile(as Fig 11,Fig 13) ,parallelism(as Fig 12) and

repetition( as Fig14).

Fig 11

Teacher Tip:

Before class, teacher has shown students mini-course to introduce the usage of

parallelism which make people feel more exciting through the strong sense of linguistic

rhythm.

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Fig 12

Fig 13

Fig 14

Students working in groups are instructed to :

1. According to Fig 11, write down simile’s source domain and target domain in each sentence

with “like” as the connective words,

2. Observing Fig 12 , write down parallelism by “let” sentence

3. Observing Fig 14, record repetition phrases with modal word “must”.

4. Translate the two simile sentences with “as...as...”, “as if” as the connective words, which is

shown in Fig 13.

5.Appreciate these rhetorical devices used by Douglass to convey his political willingness and

discuss question5:“If you were a member of the audience listening to this speech, at what points in

the speech might your mood change? How and why?”

Teacher Tips:

1.Politicians often use simile or metaphor to make the speech more vivid and

understandable.

2.Parallelism and repetition make people feel more exciting through the strong sense of

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Step 7:

1. Teacher summarize the stylistic Features of this political speech in the following aspect :

lexical features,textual features and rhetorical features.

2.Teacher summarize the way to analyze speaker’s attitudes in a speech.That is to take into

consideration the complex dynamic relationship among those language elements ( the usage of

pronouns, mental verbs, action verbs , modal verbs and descriptors), as is shown in the following :

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Homework : writing a reading report on another famous speech “I have a dream”.

Based on corpus-aided learning method shown in this lesson, use “AntConc” to analyze

this speech from the following aspects: main idea, lexical features, statistical features, textual

features, and rhetorical features and those attitude resources.

Part IV: reflection

基于语料库辅助的英语课堂教学设计是我第一次接触，5 月 18 日

Teacher Tip:

Let students improve their meta-cognitive knowledge of English learning

process , which needs learners to learn from theory to practice, so that this class recalls

what they have learned from the mini-course before class.

Teacher Tip:

Empower students to have autonomous learning outside class to modulate their

concepts and practice again.

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报名参赛以来，有幸学习了香港教育大学 EDUHK English Corpus 工作

坊 2020 提供的培训材料，耳目一新，好奇心驱使我去专研这种基于

技术支持的教学设计。当我做完这个教学设计时，我有了以下的感受

和反思：

我在平时泛读教学中的一些困惑，也许有了解决办法。那就是，

我在基于内容开展阅读教学的时候，经常因为倾向于培养学生的批判

性思维能力，阅读技巧，和补充百科知识，而没有足够的课时和办法

去处理词汇句法的学习，经常会有担心学生对泛读语篇中词汇语法的

掌握程度不够好。那么，语料库的辅助作用能有效地将词汇学习放入

具体语境，并将语篇的文体特点结合起来，还可以解决阅读效率的问

题！这将有可能在处理学生的泛读材料时，大大提高师生的学习效率，

提高学习动机。

举个例子来说，我的学生在真实课堂回答我的第 2 个问题时，她

真的很用功，她当时是把整个演讲语篇的代词使用情况做了标记，当

我访谈她的时候，她说她用了 1 小时多时间做标记，然后也得出了结

论，什么地方用到了 you,we,us, 为什么这样用。如图所示：

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于是，接下来，我会想教学生采用这种语料库辅助的方法来再做

一次问题的探究，在今后的泛读和文学教学设计方面结合语料库来开

展实践教学。

总之，技术的定位是多样的，如果有了这样的结合，我认为它不

只是工具了，是真正加强了学生的英语学习，不仅是在词汇拓展方面，

在阅读、写作、语言意识、自主学习探究等多方面都会有积极的作用。

于我的感受而言，没有教学中解决不到的问题，是功夫还不到，是教

师的专业发展还需进一步推进。在追求真理的路上，鼓励自己永葆好

奇，永葆谦逊，孜孜不倦！

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再次感谢贵校提供的学习机会！获益匪浅！希望得到专家的指

导，获得进一步提升！

成都师范学院

杨静

2020/5/29

Part V：Reference

1. 刘喜琴，《语料库辅助 EFL 自主学习的多维探索》，华南理工大学

出版社，2013

2. 孙若红，《语料库在英语专业词汇教学中的应用》，中国社会科学

出版社，2017

3. EDUHK English Corpus 工作坊提供的培训材料，2020,3

Part VI: appendix

1.拓展阅读材料：

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

Frederick Douglass

July 5, 1852

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(What follows is an abridged version. Abridged by Janet Gillespie, Director of

Programming, Community Change. The complete text may be found at:

http://masshumanities.org/programs/douglass/)

2.我在真实课堂讨论的讲稿

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? ” The Fourth of July is a time in which Americans

can celebrate their independence and freedom. In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech

titled, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” at the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in

Rochester, NY. Douglass, a former slave, was invited to speak on July 5th. Douglass uses this

opportunity to voice a major concern of his- the abolition of slavery.

Frederick Douglass passionately argues that to the slave, and even to the freed African

American, the Fourth of July is no more than a mockery of the grossest kind. Douglas uses many

rhetorical strategies to convey his powerful emotions on the subject.

①In the beginning of his speech, he separates himself from White America and those

who celebrate the Fourth of July.Douglass prolifically uses the terms “you” and “me”, “us”

and “them”, to stress the fact that this holiday is of a double-meaning, and for his people it is a

day of mourning, while for the rest of them, it is a day of blind joy.

Douglass begins by asking a series of rhetorical questions. He refers to “that” Declaration

of Independence, instead of “the” Declaration of Independence, to stress the separation between

his people and those who are not oppressed. In the next paragraph, he continues to ask rhetorical

questions. The purpose of all these questions is to give the audience the perspective that what is

suggested is not truly so.He does this by describing freedom as “yours” instead of “ours”: “It is the

birthday of your National Independence and of your political freedom” .

Douglass is correct when he says this because it really is not his day. He was a former slave

and thousands of African Americans still desired independence from their owners. It is brilliant of

him because this technique holds the attention of his listeners. Douglass reminds his audience of

what their forefathers fought for – freedom.

Douglass states “Our forefathers still fought for their freedom and their ultimate goal was

revolution. To the slave, the Fourth of July is just another reminder of the hypocrisy of this day”

(506). Douglass firmly believes that Americans need to take action. He emphasizes that America

and its freedom do not belong to him since slavery is still in effect.

Commented [1]: 道格拉斯在讲话中热情地辩称，对

奴隶，甚至对获释的非裔美国人来说，七月四日不过是最

粗鲁的嘲笑，他使用许多修辞手段来传达他对主题的强烈

情感。

Commented [2]: 道格拉斯大方地使用了“你”和“我”，

“我们”和“他们”这两个词来强调这一假期是双重意义的事

实，对他的同胞来说，这是哀悼的日子，而对于白人来说，

这是盲目的喜悦的一天。

Commented [3]: 道格拉斯首先提出了一系列的反问。

他指的是“那个独立宣言”，而不是“这个独立宣言”，以强

调他的同胞与未受压迫者之间的区别。

Commented [4]: 道格拉斯这样说是正确的，因为那

实际上不是他的日子。他曾经是奴隶，成千上万的非洲

裔美国人仍然希望摆脱其主人的独立。他之所以出色，

是因为这种技巧引起了听众的注意，使他的听众想起祖

先为之奋斗的原因就是自由。

Commented [5]: 道格拉斯认为他们的先辈们仍然为

自己的自由而战，他们的最终目标是革命。对于奴隶来

说，七月四日只是提醒这一天的虚伪。道格拉斯坚信，

美国人需要采取行动。他强调，由于奴隶制仍然有效，

美国及其自由不属于他。

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By describing the disparities between Blacks and Whites, he provides his audience with good

reason to convince their husbands, brothers, or sons to vote against slavery. His goal was to raise

awareness of this abominable crime against humanity.

②Later in his speech he includes himself when he says ‘our’ to show how they need to

work together to provide hope and initiate change. Douglass’ speech may not have made an

immediate impact on abolishing slavery, but it did increase the cognizance of it. About fifteen

years later, slavery was abolished. Through raising awareness and having hope, anything can be

accomplished.

To sum up, Douglass’ most convincing points are when he uses language to separate himself

from America’s most patriotic holiday, and how he later uses pronouns to unite with his audience

to give America a sense of hope for change.

Commented [6]: 通过描述黑人和白人之间的差距，

他为听众提供了说服他们的丈夫，兄弟或儿子投票反对奴

隶制的充分理由。他的目标是提高人们对这一可恶的危害

人类罪行的认识.

Commented [7]: 在演讲的稍后部分，当他说“我们

的”时，他将自己包括在内，以表明他们需要如何共同努

力以提供希望并发起变革。道格拉斯的讲话可能不会立即

对废除奴隶制产生影响，但确实增加了人们对奴隶制的认

识。

Commented [8]: 总之，他使用语言将自己与美国的

国庆日区分开来，以及后来他如何利用代词与听众团结在

一起，给美国带来了改变的希望。